


apple turnovers, overturned cars

by coalitiongirl_ficlets (coalitiongirl)



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen, Swan-Mills Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:26:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1566248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coalitiongirl/pseuds/coalitiongirl_ficlets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU from the middle of A Curious Thing. Henry doesn’t find Hook when he’s trying to drive out of town, and the ensuing tragedy forces Emma and Regina to have a long-needed chat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	apple turnovers, overturned cars

_He was driving out of town. The car’s totaled. He’s alive._

She hasn’t moved since they’d gotten that terse report from Emma, who’s pacing the area in front of the emergency room desk so furiously that the nurse processing new patients just darts worried glances at her every few minutes instead of asking her to move. Regina’s eyes track her, back and forth and back and forth and Regina still can’t move.

Snow and David have long since left, worried that this whole crisis has been a distraction from Zelena. As though they can do anything about it if it is. As though  _she_ can do anything. Her heart might not be in her chest but she can feel the pain striking it anyway, clenching within her and threatening to hit its limit and explode. 

She hasn’t felt like this since the apple turnover and Henry in the hospital and  _no, no, it was meant for YOU!_ and she shakes where she stands, her eyes fixed on Emma.

Emma paces.

* * *

Dark eyes watch her from under swaths of plaster, white as exposed bones and enough to force a lump into her throat when she sees Henry hidden beneath it. “Where’s my mom?”

It’s slow agony that seeps in every time she hears  _my mom_ , saltwater on an open wound. “She’s right outside. I’m sure she’ll be in soon.”

Henry shakes his head as much as he can move in his neck brace. “She’s not coming in.”

He might not know it, but she’s long ago learned that there’s no use in lies with him. Emma may claim to have the family lie detector, but to Henry, the truth is sacred beyond anything else, the roots of all his most fervid love and hatred. His trust can build her up and change her into someone else entirely. The opposite can send her crashing to the ground, a prisoner of her own despair. She knows it all too well. “I don’t think so.”

“She’s hiding from me.” He says it sullenly, but without any surprise. This Henry is no stranger to Emma’s tendency to run, then. “I almost  _died_ , and my own mom won’t come check on me.” 

 _Yes, she would. She is,_ Regina wants to say, but that way leads to even more confusion that Henry doesn’t need right now. “I’m sorry,” she says. There are no excuses she’s willing to make for Emma, not when excuses have gotten them here and Henry loathes them as much as the lies they’d be based in.

He looks up at her, his eyes sharp and inquisitive. “Why are you here? Will you tell me what’s going on?”

And she won’t lie to him, not anymore. She knows what that brings. 

An apple turnover. A wrecked yellow car. 

“The Wicked Witch of the West is trying to reset the history of the Enchanted Forest,” she says.

He slumps back down, a minute movement. “I hate this place. I hate all of you. Why won’t anyone tell me the truth?”

It’s irony that might destroy her. Wicked irony, her sister would call it.

* * *

“What…what did he say?”

“Go talk to him and find out.”

Emma stares at her, eyes wild and hurt and confused, and Regina retreats to the seat beside the hospital doors.

* * *

Henry is staring at the folder in the sleeve on the door when she walks past it into the room again. “Dr. Whale thinks that your leg casts won’t be on for more than a month or so,” she tells him. It’s not reassuring to her, but it’s about recovery. Recovery is good. Anything outside of this white room with its white walls and its white plaster that encases her son is good.

He stares at her. “What if I want to go back to New York before that?”

The thought of it is terrifying, a thousand nightmares of losing Henry again and again and again and never having the right to call him back. “I suppose you’d have to discuss it with your mother.”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t quite scowl, just watches her as though he doesn’t know what to make of her.

She stares back silently, and he presses his lips together like he’s trying not to say something. And then he does. “My file says Henry Mills,” he says. “In the door. Over there.”

She doesn’t know what to respond. He swallows, and for the first time since the accident, she sees something beyond the anger, something confused and lost and very small. She wants to hold him in her arms and croon old lullabies until he sleeps. She wants to kiss him on the forehead and promise him the world, her little prince, but instead she waits until he says, “I can’t open it. Not with one hand. Will you get my mom?”

* * *

She pokes her head outside the door to the hospital hallway and makes eye contact with Emma. “Get the hell in here,” she orders, and Emma follows silently.

* * *

“Henry…”

He doesn’t smile at her, doesn’t shout accusations like he might have as a ten-year-old. Emma stands in front of him, head hanging low and afraid to meet his eyes, and Regina doesn’t know why she’s got a hand on Emma’s arm except that Emma hasn’t pushed it off and there’s an apple turnover fresh in her memories. “I want you to read my folder. Is that my folder?”

“No,” Emma says, and they both look at her as though they can’t believe she’s still doing this even now. Her shoulders tremble. “Yes.”

She opens to the first medical history form and reads. “Name. Henry Mills. Address. 108 Mifflin Street. City. Storybrooke. State. Maine.”

It goes on and on like a slow form of torture, drops of pain dripping down upon them all with each new item added to the list. Emma doesn’t look up as she lists them and Regina doesn’t let her arm go and Henry keeps his eyes fixed on them both.

She’s halfway through his vaccinations and bloodwork when he stops her. “Did you kidnap me when I was a baby? Did my dad and Mayor Mills make you bring me home?” He doesn’t understand still, he won’t ever understand if he doesn’t believe, and these baby steps are never going to bring him to that realization. There’s no storybook this time, no magic to make it right, just a little boy wrapped in plaster casts in an emergency room, and she only wants to love him but she isn’t even allowed that.

“No!” Emma’s voice is barely a croak, the fury with which she tackles everything gone in the face of their son’s accusing glare. “No, I swear, Henry, I’m still your mom. I’ve always been your mom.” She says it with such desperation that Regina can’t even hate her for it, can’t hate her for any of this. There’s no moral high ground here, not among apple turnovers and overturned cars and lies, lies, lies about the truest believer of them all.

“You’re not my mom.” Henry spits it out, and she sees the same pain in his eyes, the betrayal leaving him harsh and cold. But when he points at her, she still quakes at the power of it. “ _She_ is.” It’s empty and unknowing and it still brings her to tears in an instant, her missing heart overflowing with so much love that she can’t remember how to make it beat.

Emma turns on her heel and runs from the room.

* * *

They both can’t go far, trapped in the gravity field that is their son in danger, and Regina catches up to Emma when she’s halfway down the hall. “You need to get a grip,” she nearly snarls, because Henry is crying in his room and there’s no explanation for him, nothing that makes sense, and the truth would only sound like a cruel joke. “This isn’t about you, Miss Swan. This is about my son. And I won’t have you-“

“What?” Emma demands. “What won’t you have me do? Run away? Did you see him in there?” She snarls out the next words, low and furious once more. “What are you going to tell me, that you’d  _never_ do something so selfish?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she says, because she’s done worse, because Henry might have been happy if she’d run from him even once.

Emma stalks forward, eyes flashing. “Fine, then. Tell me how you’re the better mother. Tell me how it was a mistake to ever trust me with him. Tell me how I’ve _ruined_ him, nearly  _killed_ him because I’m a crap parent and crap at keeping him happy without your memories to do it for me!”

She’s taken aback. She knows there’s been hostility from Emma toward her for weeks now, since she’d first introduced Henry to her. But Emma had been the one to push for that. She’d thought that this had just been their usual back-and-forth, even if Emma’s snipes had been edging on cruel of late and she doesn’t know how to respond to her anymore. “What are you going on about now?”

“You want to take him back!” The words tear from her throat, a scream loud enough to attract the attention of nurses hurrying by. Regina fixes them with cold glares until they move on, quick to avoid being caught in the crossfire between evil queen and savior. “I don’t give a damn about this town, about Zelena, about anything but Henry and…and being Henry’s mother. Don’t you understand?”

“Of course I understand, you idiot.” She’d said nearly the exact same thing to Emma in Neverland, when she’d been alone and Henry had lost his heart. “I understand that you want to take him away from here. That you wanted him to never be mine again.” The worst of the gibes– the doubts cast on her parenting, the disbelief that she could have people she loved– they make a grim kind of sense now that Emma’s here, lashing out at her for Emma’s own lies.

“You gave him up!” Emma says desperately, and Regina slaps her and slaps her and slaps her until Emma’s cheek is bright red and there’s blood on her lip and they’re both sobbing with fury and helplessness and the terror of being alone.

* * *

“Tell me the truth.”

“Your mother gave you up for adoption when you were a baby. She didn’t see you again until you were ten.”

“That’s impossible.”

“So is the Wicked Witch of the West, but here we are.”

He looks hard at her and doesn’t laugh. “So if the Wicked Witch of the West is fighting you, then what does that make you? Dorothy?”

“No,” she says.

* * *

Emma’s crouched on the floor in the public bathroom, leaning against the outside wall with her hands wrapped around her knees. She hasn’t cleaned the blood off her lip, and it’s smeared across her cheek in a thin red stripe. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“Emma.” It comes out gentler than she means it to, gentler than she’d felt in all the time that she’d known Emma Swan. She thinks she can see Henry in her now, in this angry, lonely girl hiding from the world, and it’s impossible not to love him for it. Not to love her a tiny bit for it, too, because Henry is still everything and because of Emma she’d still had him for ten years that only she remembers.

“I don’t want to hear it.”

She puts down the toilet seat and digs in her pocketbook until she finds a handkerchief to sit on. “I don’t care,” she says.

“Fine.”

She crosses her legs and pinches her forehead and Emma stares at the ground between her feet. “Henry runs when he’s angry. When he feels like he doesn’t belong. You think I don’t know that? Do you even remember the night we met?”

Emma’s eyes dart up, meet hers, then stare down again. “You lied to him. You lied to him for his whole life because you thought it was best for him. You kept him from magic and fairytales and did anything you could so he’d never know.” She recites the information as though by rote, listing off items in the Evil Queen agenda book. Regina flinches. It’s a new level to her nastiness, stronger still than snide remarks in its naked honesty. It’s who she’d been, and Emma never lets her forget it.

But there are tears gleaming in Emma’s eyes, understanding that shatters her with only a single knowing look from someone who had, somehow, become exactly her in the end. “And then he got tired of the lying and he ran away and you knew he was going to get hurt, you knew you’d destroyed him when all you meant to do was to protect him. No. To  _keep_  him.” She shudders. “We lose him when we give him what he wants from us.”

“Yes.” Her heart fights to break free again, to think of anything other than an apple turnover and a Volkswagen Beetle driving away over the town line. “I didn’t  _give him up_ ,” she reminds her. “I wanted to keep him safe. I had to let him go.”

“For his best chance,” Emma whispers, and she can only dare nod in response.

* * *

Henry looks up when she comes back in. “Oh. It’s you.” The curiosity still burns in his eyes, but she recognizes the disappointment and breathes through it. He’s a little boy who can only remember one mother, and it’s not her he wants, more so than even the truth he craves so deeply. It’s the woman who trails in behind her and brings the light back into Henry’s eyes as quickly as he looks away.

“I’m sorry,” Emma says softly, and when her hand bumps into Regina’s and slips into it, she holds it tightly. “For not telling you the truth.”

“The truth doesn’t make any sense,” Henry mutters, staring at them both. “None of this makes sense.”

“I wish I could give you a better story.” Emma almost smiles. “This one’s a pretty good one, though. If you’ll hear it.”

“Who are you? Both of you, I mean.” His face is open now, beseeching, pleading for something real to know. And she doesn’t know where to begin, what to say, how to explain any of this to a boy with no memories of her. She feels like she’s intruding on his world with Emma, like she’s meaningless in the new scheme of things between them; except perhaps to remain wrapped in Emma’s grip, soft skin against hers as their hands clamp together. “What are you to me?”

Emma answers for them both, and she says nothing about evil queens or saviors or destiny and curses and memories. “We’re your moms.”

In the end, it’s all they are.


End file.
